Editorial to: Reading wide, writing wide in the digital age

Editorial to: Reading wide, writing wide in the digital age
Miriam Llamas Ubieto
The special issue ''Reading Wide, Writing Wide in the Digital Age'' can be classified under the theoretical studies on digital literature and culture that, within Digital Humanities, take a qualitative and critical approach to their object of study. They deal with the production, circulation and reception of electronic textualities, widening the more restrictive notion what can be considered a literary text, while consciously considering the epistemological models that may be productive in their analysis. The selected papers presented here attempt to give a variety of responses to an increasingly important issue: how the 'wide' aspect linked to digital environments affects literary and textual practices and what the consequences may be. The particular characteristics of the digital medium have contributed to an unprecedented acceleration in the circulation of materials, texts, memories, knowledge and subjects, as well as a proliferation of interconnections on a huge, even global scale, while the paradigm of the national and the local still coexists alongside it. Changes to communicative processes and the way knowledge is accessed involve a broader, more dynamic and interconnected view of the world, a change in perception. The spread and increase of digital archives, the expansive forms of the globalisation of knowledge, the agglutinative extension of textual information and multimedia are breaking through barriers and allowing the dissemination of the object, be it text, book, corpus or subject. This leads us to wonder, firstly, given the wide, transcultural and even global scope of digital technology, if textual, particularly literary, practices of production, circulation and reception, are really changing; if this circulation is in fact changing writing and ways of reading. It is important to reflect on whether this circulation is widening literary practices by means of new forms of distribution, new communities
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of writers and readers with their own rituals, new codes, new imaginaries or new
ways of positioning themselves in relation to the previous and the local. Secondly,
because of the ability of digital technology to expand, multiply and widen both the
material and the archive, we wonder if it is also widening writing and reading
practices and pushing the boundaries of the device, the book, the author, the
conventional or academic act of reading, that is, a crossover that is more than a mere
extrapolation of previous traditions.
A double process of peer review at two different stages, once as abstracts and
then as fully written up papers, resulted in the six papers included here. They all
coincide that digital literary studies need to be ‘‘widened’’ to study the intersection
between what we consider as the ‘‘digital turn’’ and the ‘‘spatial turn’’ of our era. In
fact, in the same way that we argue that the practice of reading can be affected by
the ‘widening’ effect of the digital, the same happens with approaches to studying
both texts and literary practices in the digital era: although academic, they are also
readings and are subject to that ‘widening’. All the authors we present, from their
various academic origins, have found that the spatial concepts and metaphors that
we call the ‘‘spatial turn’’ can be productive epistemological models to approach the
problem. This spatialisation by means of ‘vectors’, ‘crossovers’, ‘syntopies’,
circulations, fields, maps and ubiquities is not only due to the imaginary and
conceptual metaphor suggested by the term ‘wide’, but also to the impact of spatial
technology development in shaping knowledge and humanistic disciplines.
However, unlike the static use of spatial conceptualisation to explain the digital culture
that goes back further than the metaphor of the net, all the papers point to a
dynamism of space, or in space, which breaks boundaries and explains the novel
writing and reading phenomena found.
The papers selected, when examining these processes of change from different
angles, offer a fairly comprehensive all-round view. Papers by Odile Farge, Amelia
Sanz and Germa´n Sierra address the new practices of production or writing in the
digital space and the forms that these practices take on by being part of circulation
on a global scale, as well as the new global communities and imaginaries. Odile
Farge in ‘‘Authoring Software-tools in Digital Literatures: A Vector of a Global
Imaginary’’ asks how globalised software is changing writing. She defines it as a
tool for constructing a discursive global imaginary that becomes a vector that
moulds new writing practices. A new global code mediates the possibilities and the
boundaries of individual authorship and influences its writing and artistic creation
practices, whereby writers are connected to globalisation processes. ‘‘Digital
Literatures Circulation: Testing Post-Bourdieu Theories’’, by Amelia Sanz, uses
post-Bourdieu methodology to explore the particular case of Digital Literatures that
were born to circulate on the globalised internet, to investigate the consequences of
that circulation and the emergence of a dynamic field not encapsulated by national
boundaries but that responds to new forms of institutionalisation at the global level.
Germa´n Sierra tackles the new global codes and formulas and new international
communities of writers in ‘‘Postdigital Synchronicity and Syntopy: The
Manipulation of Universal Codes’’ and also shows how the new forms taken on by literary
products break through the boundaries of the literary object itself. Practices and
Editorial to: Reading wide, writing wide in the digital age
products adopt codes and aesthetics to adapt to the global, the synchronic and the
syntopic and are also a sign of a postdigital art.
The issue of both productive and receptive widening literary practices is
precisely the focus of the paper by Ana Marques da Silva and Sandra Bettencourt
entitled ‘‘Writing-Reading Devices: Crossovers’’. Through their detailed
microanalyses they show the postdigital transgression of writing boundaries, the act of
reading and of the book as device, explaining how these elements widen in praxis by
means of intersections, crossovers and intermediations leading to a distributed
authorship and reimaginations of genres. Diogo Marques in ‘‘Poetic Fingerprints:
Digital Literature’s Countercultural and Metamedial Integration of Vision and
Touch’’ explores also these transgressions dealing with the integration of sense
modalities such a touch and haptic visuality.
Lastly, paper by Enrique Santos is focused on the transformation and widening of
reading practices. In ‘‘GIS and Telescopic Reading: between Spatial and Digital
Humanities’’ Santos deals with the change in paradigm of literary reading in the
academic sphere that has occurred with the arrival of GIS in the digital and
cartographic turn. Santos puts forward a wide study of literature using what he terms
a telescopic reading that interlinks quantitative and qualitative methods.
In all cases, the study of wide circulation in digital environments enables us to
highlight novelty and change in reading and writing practices in the digital era.